The Book of Nehemiah suggests that the priest-scribe Ezra brought the Torah back from Babylon to the Second Temple of Jerusalem (8–9) around the same time period.
The Book of Sirach provides evidence of a collection of sacred scriptures similar to portions of the Hebrew Bible.
Based on this list of names, some scholars have conjectured that the author, Yeshua ben Sira, had access to, and considered authoritative, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets.
Philo and Josephus (both associated with first-century Hellenistic Judaism) ascribed divine inspiration to its translators, and the primary ancient account of the process is the circa 2nd-century BCE Letter of Aristeas.
[13] In the 1st century CE, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria discussed sacred books, but made no mention of a three-part division of the Bible;[citation needed] although his De vita contemplativa[14] (sometimes suggested in the 19th century to be of later, Christian, authorship)[15] does state at III(25) that "studying… the laws and the sacred oracles of God enunciated by the holy prophets, and hymns, and psalms, and all kinds of other things by reason of which knowledge and piety are increased and brought to perfection."
Then God tells him: Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first, and let the worthy and the unworthy read them; but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people.
[25] But, according to Bacher and Grätz, Akiva was not opposed to a private reading of the Apocrypha, as is evident from the fact that he himself makes frequent use of Sirach.
The Mishnah, compiled at the end of the 2nd century CE, describes a debate over the status of some books of Ketuvim, and in particular over whether or not they render the hands ritually impure.
The Megillat Ta'anit, in a discussion of days when fasting is prohibited but that are not noted in the Bible, mentions the holiday of Purim.
Based on these, and a few similar references, Heinrich Graetz concluded in 1871 that there had been a Council of Jamnia (or Yavne in Hebrew) which had decided Jewish canon sometime in the late 1st century (c. 70–90).
[34] Sid Z. Leiman made an independent challenge for his University of Pennsylvania thesis published later as a book in 1976, in which he wrote that none of the sources used to support the theory actually mentioned books that had been withdrawn from a canon, and questioned the whole premise that the discussions were about canonicity at all, stating that they were actually dealing with other concerns entirely.